The valves can be thought of as traffic shaping, or Quality of Service (QoS). All along these pipes are valves for controlling the flow of water. A large water pipe enters a neighborhood, a smaller pipe splits off the mainline and goes into a home, and within the home even smaller pipes go to each faucet. I'll change Ted's tubes to pipes, as in water pipes.

I don't think the analogy was funny, I think Ted's delivery made us laugh. We had a good laugh in 2006, when Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens called the internet a series of tubes. (Okay, having favorite reasons for slow bandwidth is a bit weird, even for me.) This paper explains causes for slow bandwidth. What did your experiment find?Īn excellent explanation for why measured bandwidth is less advertised bandwidth is in a paper from MIT.

My hypothesis is for more than 99% of all runs, advertised speed will be greater than measured speed. Do an experiment: 1) find your advertised bandwidth, and 2) run SpeedTest. SpeedTest returns upload and download speed in bps. Yes, a picture of a car's speedometer would have been better than the sunflowers. SpeedTest sends or receives packets of increasing size from your device to the nearest SpeedTest server. SpeedTest is easy to install and even easier to run - there is only button - just push it. There are many tools for measuring bandwidth, my favorite is SpeedTest from Ookla, which runs on tablets, laptops and smart phones. If we assume reasonably intelligent people are making the measurements and know enough to use the same units of measure, which is (Giga, Mega, kilo) bits per second (bps), then the post does not begin to explain why an ISPs advertised speed does not match measured speed. However, this explanation is far too simple. And this explains why advertised speed is not the same as measured speed. So, you need to divide by 8 to convert between bits and bytes. The author concluded most people are familiar with bytes, but bandwidth is measured in bits. I read a LinkedIn post about measured bandwidth not being the same as advertised bandwidth.

Why does megasync download slow